Eric Tian

If you were to say chocolate ice-cream sucks, nobody would take that as a universal truth. We all understand what you really mean is you think chocolate ice-cream sucks.

Yet, why do we enjoy hearing blanket statements about the world like life is meaningless or people are mean? Do human laws make life easier to manage, like mathematics? Is there comfort in believing your experience isn’t unique; that you are not alone?

But let’s take a step back.

If you say life is meaningless, you probably think your life is meaningless. It doesn’t mean that everyone else’s is. If you say people are mean, you probably think people in your life are mean. It doesn’t mean everybody is. Like chocolate ice-cream, your subjective experience is purely that – subjective.

When we make a big claim, it’s helpful to consider does that really apply to everyone? Some – like mathematics – might. Some might not. The ultimate irony is, it’s up to you to decide.

When I was in high school, I thought everyone over the age of 20 was old. In my mind, there existed only little people (<12); normal people (12-19); and old people (20+).

But then of course, I turned 20. That was a sad day.

It’s strange how fast time flies. One moment, you’re lost in one chapter of your life and in the blink of an eye, you wake up in the middle of another chapter. What happened in between? Were you in a coma? This phenomenon of time flying past can be terrifying.

One antidote I’ve found to time flying past is to look for novelty. In Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer suggests a simple habit to stretch out time:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthy and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Upon reflection, the times I’ve felt large chunks of time fly past are when I’ve been stuck in a routine. Some examples include grinding 8-hour study days in undergrad and working full-time over a summer break. All the days look the same. There is nothing new to break up the monotony.

But whenever a worthy challenge or adventure emerges, time slows down. The moments I’ve felt the most in-tune with the world are when I’m at the top of a spectacular mountain, learning a new skill or trying a new hobby. Time shrinks to the present moment.

As a child, it’s easy to treat every moment with slow, wide-eyed wonder because everything is new. Perhaps the reason time feels faster as we age is because we have fewer novel experiences.

Routines are great for productivity, but novelty might be essential for the soul.

I don’t know what to write. In the last hour, I’ve started over 50 sentences but have deleted them all. Hello there writer’s block – we meet again.

In desperate need for inspiration, I open my Kindle highlights and scan for any writing prompts. But everything is either uninteresting to me right now or would take too long to write on.

As I’m on the verge of giving up, one highlight from a book I read years ago shines out to me. It’s from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – an appropriate title for my situation, I guess. The quote goes like this:

When you write, don’t say, “I’m going to write a poem.” That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, “I am free to write the worst junk in the world.” You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination.

Reading this was oddly comforting. When you start doing something a lot, there’s this expectation that the quality of your work must increase with time – that each iteration must be better than the one before. But life is rarely so linear. There are ups and downs, highs and lows; times you feel inspired and times where you just want to nap. Right now, I just want to nap.

So here I am, back to writing unedited junk. And it’s great fun. Let’s hope the next post will be better.